Climate Science Glossary

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All IPCC definitions taken from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I, Glossary, pp. 941-954. Cambridge University Press.

"Only with positive feedbacks from water vapor and clouds does one get the large warmings that are associated with alarm. What the satellite data seems to show is that these positive feedbacks are model artifacts."

"You have to remember, this is an issue where what most scientists agree on has nothing to do with the alarm. I think the real problem is so many scientists have gone along with it without pointing out that what has been established reasonably well has nothing to do with the urgency that’s being promoted, which is largely a political matter."

"In the North Pole, you don’t have a [ice] cap, you have sea ice; it’s very variable. And as far as Greenland and Antarctica go, there’s no evidence of any significant change. I mean, you know, again your measurements aren’t that great, but any reports you hear are again focusing on tiny changes that would have no implication."

"The crucial thing is sensitivity: you know, what do you expect a doubling of CO2 to do? If it's only a degree, then you could go through at least two doublings and probably exhaust much of your fossil fuel before you would do anything that would bother anyone."

"[Emissions cuts] would be a moral disaster, because it would mean that much of the world would preclude development and so they'd be more vulnerable to the disasters that occur regardless of man [...] Your vulnerability increases as your wealth decreases."

"It's a heavy cost for no benefit, and it's no benefit for you, no benefit for your children, no benefit for your grandchildren, no benefit for your great-great-great-great-grandchildren. I mean, what's the point of that?"

"I think even Flannery acknowledged that Australia doing this [a carbon tax] would have no discernible impact for virtually a millennium, even if Australia's output during that millennium was increasing exponentially."

"If we doubled CO2, it's well accepted that you should get about 1 degree warming if nothing else happened. [...] But 1 degree is reckoned as not very significant. The question then is: is what we've seen so far suggesting that you have more than that, and the answer is no."

"The models do say you should have seen 2-5 times more than you've already seen, you know, you have to then accept, if you believe the models, that you actually should have gotten far more warming than you've seen, but some mysterious process has cancelled part of it."

"If it's greenhouse warming, you get more warming in the middle of the troposphere, the first 10, 12 kilometres of the atmosphere than you do at the surface. There are good theoretical reasons for that, having to do with how the greenhouse works."

"CO2 for different people has different attractions. After all, what is it? – it’s not a pollutant, it’s a product of every living creature’s breathing, it’s the product of all plant respiration, it is essential for plant life and photosynthesis, it’s a product of all industrial burning, it’s a product of driving..."

"the main greenhouse gas is water vapor which is both natural in origin and highly variable in its distribution. In the absence of good records of water vapor we aren't even in a position to say how much total greenhouse gases have increased."

"On the planet the most wonderful constituent is water with its remarkable thermodynamic properties. It's the obvious candidate for the thermostat of our system, and yet in most of these models, all water-related feedbacks are positive. I don't think we would have existed if that were true"

"Water vapor is far and away the most important greenhouse gas, except for one form which isn't a greenhouse gas: clouds. Clouds themselves as liquid water are as important to the infrared budget as water vapor. Both swamp by orders of magnitude all the others. With CO2 one is talking about three watts per square meter at most, compared to a hundred or more watts per square meter for water"

"in 1983 a panel of the National Academy of Sciences recommended a technique to validate climate models known as "fingerprinting"--efforts to find at least regional effects in modeling that are correct. This has turned out to be a disaster in methodology, because all the models differ even in their signs [directions] of predicted change, and they don't even agree on these features for the present climate"

"It is interesting that before this last appearance of 'greenhouse warming' (1970 to present), there were actually quite a log of books on the coming ice age. Now a new set of books on the coming warming are hitting the stands"

"What we have is data that says that maybe [warming] occurs, but it's within the noise....The point we have to keep in mind is that without any of this at all our climate would wander--at least within limits"

"The trouble is that the earlier data suggest that one is starting at what probably was an anomalous minimum near 1880. The entire record would more likely be saying that the rise is 0.1 degree plus or minus 0.3 degree...I would say, and I don't think I'm going out on a very big limb, that the data as we have it does not support a warming"

"Urbanization also creates problems in interpreting the temperature record. There is the problem of making corrections for the greater inherent warming over cities--in moving weather stations from a city to an outlying airport, for example"